Restarting Unity after Exchange reboot

maratimer_2 · ‎06-08-2007

In a very large AD/exchange environment, we are increasingly having issues with Unity after an exchange server is rebooted. We have Unity 4.2.1 and 4.05 deployed, each with unity subscribers across multiple exchange servers. There does not seem to be any consistency with Unity when rebooting exchange servers. Sometimes, Unity recovers seemingly without issue after a partner or associated exchange server is rebooted, other times, we have to stop and restart the Unity services in order to get message delivery and MWI working, and occassionally, we need to go as far as rebooting both unity and the exchange server which unity has lost communication with to resolve the issue. With so many unity and exchange servers, this gets very high visibility with the customer as they always report "Unity is down/not working"..

The troubleshooting guide states only "When you shut down and restart Microsoft Exchange on the Cisco?Unity server, Cisco?Unity may need to be restarted manually." but does not give any detail as to what the dependancy is. Can someone please tell me what we need to do from a unity perspective in order to be able to recover from exchange reboots without having an incident declared by the customer? Other than monitoring the event logs for errors, is there something we can do to be more proactive?

Ginger Dillon · ‎06-08-2007

Hi -

We have Unity servers installed in 5 different domains, same AD forest and although we occasionally have to resynch MWI after an Exchange server reboot, we've not had issues Unity where a reboot was necessary. To help mitigate this, I would recommend:

- Ensure partner Exchange servers in same subnet as each Unity server (minimum 40 ms. response time)

- Set MWI resynch to occur nightly (time Exchange reboots to occur before this) which will minimize you having to do this manually

- I would use Insight Manager, or Unity event notification, or another tool to page you when the specific event message shows Unity has lost connectivity to Exchange server. That way you can be more proactive and respond.

- Check UMR for messages that are still in the UnityMTA directory after Exchange reboots. Sometimes all it takes is a recycle of the AvUMRSyncSvr server to get these messages moved over to Exchange.

Sincerely,

Ginger

maratimer_2 · ‎06-08-2007

Thanks Ginger, we have followed all of these design and best practices..I was just wondering if anyone actually knew the exact point of failure..due to the fact that sometimes unity recovers and sometimes it doesnt...(more often in our case)..